CRT 245 — Crit Thinking & Media Literacy
Critical Thinking and Media Literacy is a course designed to help students become truth-seekers in the world of new media. Students develop a critical understanding of the nature of diverse media discourses – including aims to inform, entertain, and persuade – and evaluate their contents for veracity. This course exposes the students to two sets of basic concepts: First, epistemic concepts such as truth, falsity, knowledge, and belief; and second, media concepts, including both traditional (e.g., news, commentary, reporting) and contemporary ones (e.g., social networks, new media, fake news, click-bait). In addition, it provides them with analytical methods to interpret different kinds of media contents, as well as to write critical media analyses.